INTERVIEW: JERRY CORREA — Taking the high road

CEO reflects on St. Francis Healthcare System’s renewed mission

By Patrick Downes
Hawaii Catholic Herald

2012 was an auspicious year for St. Francis Healthcare System of Hawaii. That was the year it got back as part of a bankruptcy settlement the two hospitals it had sold to Hawaii Medical Center in 2007. That year Marianne Cope, the matriarch of the Sisters of St. Francis in Hawaii, was canonized in Rome. And that was the year Jerry Correa became the first lay person appointed St. Francis’ chief executive officer.

These are some of the things you learn from the healthcare system’s once-a-decade introspective book published this year to mark the 95th anniversary of the opening of St. Francis Hospital in Liliha. The name of the 127-page volume, written by Sister of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities Geraldine Ching, is “Taking the High Road.”

Correa joined the Hawaii Catholic Herald by Zoom Aug. 3 to discuss the anniversary, his job at St. Francis, and the book.

Why celebrate 95, instead of waiting until 100? It goes back to the first anniversary book published in the 65th year by the visionary St. Francis Hospital administrator Sister Maureen Keleher. That was followed 10 years later by the 75th anniversary book.

“Then we did one on the 85th anniversary,” Correa said, “so we just followed suit with the 95th. It has been every 10 years from the 65th.”

“Interestingly enough,” he said, “during those intervals, a lot of things have happened.”

For this year’s book, he encouraged the author, Sister Geraldine, his predecessor as CEO, to avoid simply recalling a “straight-forward” list of dates and events, though that is included.

He said he wanted the reader to “actually experience” what the administrators were thinking when the big decisions were made.

The result are chapters, some wrenching, about the healthcare system divesting its two hospitals, the financial troubles of Hawaii Medical Center, the closing of the centers, the reorganization, dealing with the negative publicity, and the decision not to sue the doctor-owners of Hawaii Medical Center.

The latter decision was one of several instances that inspired the name of the book, “Taking the High Road.”

St. Francis was within its rights to sue. It was part of the original agreement. “But how can we sue the doctors?” Correa said. “How can we do that? That’s not us. If we did that, what good would it do?”

Why did St. Francis sell the centers in the first place? Because compassion had become too expensive.

“Our mission collided with Medicare and the payment system,” Correa explained. “When somebody comes to the hospital and they have a pacemaker put in, Medicare is only going to pay for three days. But if they had no discharge family to go to, then we kept them until they were ready to go. And that’s real. That really happened.”

The reason the hospitals were sold to the newly formed, doctor-owned Hawaii Medical Center, and not Queen’s or Hawaii Pacific Health, he said, “was because that group was made-up of a lot of physicians that practiced at St. Francis. Their fathers were physicians there.”

Sister Beatrice Tom, CEO at the time, “saw the loyalty. She saw that they would understand the mission the most,” he said.

The sale and the new owner’s ultimate failure stirred up media interest and St. Francis was sometimes painted with a negative brush. But rather than engage, “there’s times you just gotta bite your tongue,” Correa said. And decide on the high road.

“It’s always worked for us,” he said.

Doing the right thing?

Correa started out at Outrigger Hotels in 1984, as an intern straight out of college, and became director of IT (information technology).

In 1997 and 1998, five family members died — his grandmother, two uncles and two cousins. It made him reevaluate his life’s goals.

“I went back to Kauai in the span of 12 months for five funerals. My wife, Mari-Jo, and I were working, and our kids were 4 and 2, and I just said, ‘Are we doing the right thing?’ Outrigger was a good organization, but I just wanted to do something that had more of a mission,” he said.

“When I read the mission statement of St. Francis creating healthy communities in the spirit of Christ’s healing ministry, I said, ‘I really want to do this,’” he said.

He joined St. Francis in late 1998 and by 2001 was its chief information officer. After the sale of the two hospitals in 2007, he went “with the sale” to Hawaii Medical Center as the chief information officer there. He returned to St. Francis as chief operating officer a couple months after the sale.

When Sister Geraldine asked Correa if he would consider the CEO position, he replied that he wasn’t familiar enough with the mission of the organization to qualify. “That’s when she said, ‘OK, but if you didn’t have enough mission, I wouldn’t be asking you.’”

Correa felt that, though he had been working for Saint Francis for 13 years, mostly in finance, he didn’t really pay attention to certain things. Like community relationships.

“I had no idea that the sisters had a relationship with Judge (James) Burns. I had no idea that the sisters had a relationship with (Honolulu Mayor) Frank Fasi. I had no idea about the real connection between the (Maurice) Sullivan family or the Clarence T.C. Ching family and the sisters,” he said.

And he had never been to Kalaupapa.

“You’ve got to go to Kalaupapa,” Sister Geraldine told him.

When he did, the visit “just blew me away,” he said.

“That trip was very spiritual for me. It gave me a different idea about Kalaupapa. I didn’t realize how devastating it was in that time to be isolated and segregated. It was really a special day and I’ve been back several times.”

He also went to the Franciscan Sisters motherhouse in Syracuse, N.Y., to learn more about their spirituality and motivation.

“I started to feel what the sisters were about, I kind of understood a little bit more about what drove the sisters back then. I realized that I am not even close to their courage and risk-taking. But now I understand why they did certain things,” he said.

He received one mission lesson directly from Sister Geraldine.

“I remember a conversation, which is not in the book,” he said, in which he told Sister Geraldine that if they came into some settlement money, he would like to set up an endowment to have money to pay for projects “in perpetuity.”

“And sister said, ‘No. We are going to spend that money now; push that money out to the community. The more money we can raise and get, the more people we can help. It’s not like you put a cap on the number of people you can help.’”

“And I was just looking at her and going, whoa. But that’s the way it is. That gave me a good understanding of their mission and what’s involved in how much they push the envelope in helping the community.”

A lot of firsts

From their work with Hawaii’s Hansen’s disease patients, to starting Maui Memorial, to helping out Hilo Hospital, the Sisters of St. Francis pioneered “a lot of firsts.” Later these “firsts” would include hospice, organ transplants, bone marrow treatment and dialysis.

“They pioneer in areas where there’s no reimbursement,” Correa said. There was no reimbursement for dialysis or for hospice when they started those programs. A lot of that was Sister Maureen Keleher’s vision.

“I can imagine the chief financial officer pulling his hair out back then,” he said, “because right now we are creating the Kupuna Village and doing things for caregivers where there’s no reimbursement.”

Kupuna village

St. Francis Medical Center West in Ewa was sold in 2012 to the Queen’s Health Systems who reopened it as an acute care facility. At the Liliha property, after a lot of brainstorming and soul-searching, Kupuna Village emerged.

“The concept of a one-stop shop for kupuna and caregivers is just in line with what the sisters have done in the past, pioneering, going someplace where nobody’s gone before,” he said.

Come to the Liliha today and you will see a skilled nursing service, rehabilitation services, assisted living with memory care and a caregiver program. It has cooking demonstration rooms, and exercise classes not just for seniors but for caregivers, too. Forty to 50 classes serve 1,600 caregivers a year.

“And downstairs, that’s what actually makes the campus hum,” Correa said.

“There’s 66 seats of dialysis downstairs. They see 140 cancer patients a day at the Cancer Center. There’s a vision center, there’s audiology, there are family practitioners, there are labs, there’s imaging and there’s Hawaii Pacific Neuroscience, the biggest neurology group in the state. It’s right in our lobby and it is taking care of things like dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s ALS, MS, stroke, depression, sleep deprivation.”

“It’s not all owned by Saint Francis. There are different providers,” Correa said.

“And people come in and say, ‘It’s really the right time for something like this.’”

“What’s amazing is that when you go back prior to 2012, after the hospitals were sold and when they came back, it’s like, holy smoke, it wasn’t like it was planned.”

Correa remembers Franciscan Sister Davilyn Ah Chick, chair-emeritus of the St. Francis Healthcare System’s Board of Directors, saying this a lot: “St. Marianne’s not done yet.”

“We still have something to do and that is to create a campus for our seniors and for our caregivers,” he said.

Stepping up during COVID

Then there is the coronavirus pandemic.

“I remember many times during COVID when I was reflecting on what the sisters would do,” Correa said. “Closing services was very far from our minds.”

When preschools and adult daycares were shuttering, St. Francis kept its Ewa facilities open. “I really felt good to be able to do that, and we did take a (financial) hit, but I’ll take the responsibility for that because I think that was the right thing to do.”

At the height of COVID, he got a call for help from the city Elderly Affairs Division and Meals on Wheels because the free meal delivery service was losing a lot of its senior volunteers to quarantine. St. Francis stepped up raising a million dollars, managing call centers, acquiring laid off hotel valet parkers as drivers, and helping deliver up to 1,400 meals a day for several months.

Correa and his wife both had delivery routes.

“That was really intense, every day,” he said.

The food delivery led to “wrap-around services” provided when delivery drivers learned of other needs the seniors had besides food, such as transportation to doctor appointments.

“Food is an interesting thing,” Correa said. “It builds trust.”

“Healthcare is tough right now, but a lot of businesses are tough. Just finding labor is hard. Everybody is running into similar situations across all industries.”

“The demand is there,” he said. Still needed are hospice, skilled nursing and assisted living. “Do we have enough people to take care of that volume? No.”

“I was having this discussion with Sister Geraldine the other day. Every once in a while, I sit down with her and vent when I feel like I am always swimming upstream, feeling sorry for myself.” Correa said.

“Sister Geraldine told me that is very Franciscan. It was never easy for St. Francis; it was never easy for Mother Marianne. When she came over here it was tough. She had to deal with being a white woman. She had to do what she needed to do with the Department of Health. She needed to do whatever she needed to do to make things work. It wasn’t a cakewalk.”

“So, if you feel you are struggling,” he said, “she is just saying that that’s very Franciscan.”